A recent article written by former New York Mayor Ed Koch began with the grim observation that no criminal charges have been brought against any of the malefactors responsible for causing the financial crisis:

Looking back on 2010 and the Great Recession, I continue to be enraged by the lack of accountability for those who wrecked our economy and brought the U.S. to its knees. The shocking truth is that those who did the damage are still in charge. Many who ran Wall Street before and during the debacle are either still there making millions, if not billions, of dollars, or are in charge of our country’s economic policies which led to the debacle.

Most of us assumed that the Enron scandal had set a precedent for the prosecution of corporate financial crime. A few Enron executives received prison sentences and the CEO, Ken Lay, died while serving time. Enron’s auditor, Arthur Andersen & Company, was forced out of business. In the wake of the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s, Charles Keating and a few of his associates were indicted by the State of California. Keating eventually received a ten-year prison sentence for fraud, racketeering and conspiracy. Keating’s prosecution resulted from pressure brought by William Black, former litigation director for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. At one point during Black’s investigation, Keating issued a written memo to one of his minions, with this directive: “If you can’t get Wright and Congress to get Black . . . Kill him dead.”

The FBI and the DOJ remain unlikely to prosecute the elite bank officers that ran the enormous “accounting control frauds” that drove the financial crisis. While over 1000 elites were convicted of felonies arising from the savings and loan (S&L) debacle, there are no convictions of controlling officers of the large nonprime lenders. The only indictment of controlling officers of a far smaller nonprime lender arose not from an investigation of the nonprime loans but rather from the lender’s alleged efforts to defraud the federal government’s TARP bailout program.

What has gone so catastrophically wrong with DOJ, and why has it continued so long? The fundamental flaw is that DOJ’s senior leadership cannot conceive of elite bankers as criminals.

* * *

Our best bet is to continue to win the scholarly disputes and to continue to push media representatives to take fraud seriously. If the media demands for prosecution of the elite banking frauds expand there is a chance to create a bipartisan coalition in Congress and the administration supporting prosecutions. In the S&L debacle, Representative Annunzio was one of the leading opponents of reregulation and leading supporters of Charles Keating. After we brought several hundred successful prosecutions he began wearing a huge button: “Jail the S&L Crooks!” Bringing many hundreds of enforcement actions, civil suits, and prosecutions causes huge changes in the way a crisis is perceived. It makes tens of thousands of documents detailing the frauds public. It generates thousands of national and local news stories discussing the nature of the frauds and how wealthy the senior officers became through the frauds. All of this increases the saliency of fraud and increases demands for serious reforms, adequate resources for the regulators and criminal justice bodies, and makes clear that elite fraud poses a severe danger. Collectively, this creates the political space for real reform, vigorous regulators, and real prosecutors.

Hedge fund manager, David Einhorn (author of Fooling Some of the People All of the Time) was recently interviewed by Charlie Rose. At one point during the interview, Charlie Rose asked Einhorn to address the argument that regulators lacked the tools necessary for preventing the financial crisis. Mr. Einhorn gave this response:

I would actually disagree with that. I think that the problem was that the laws were not enforced. After Enron you had Sarbanes Oxley. And there have been hardly any prosecutions under Sarbanes Oxley. You put in a tough anti-fraud law. The CEO has to sign there is no fraud.

The CFO has to sign that the financial statements are correct. If it’s not, there are going to be criminal consequences to all of this. And the result was that effectively you passed a law but then they didn’t enforce the law.

And once the bad guys figured out that the law wasn’t being enforced, it effectively provided cover because everybody said, look we have the tough antifraud law. The fraud must have gone away.

We often hear the expression “crime of the century” to describe some sensational act of blood lust. Nevertheless, keep in mind that the financial crisis resulted from a massive fraud scheme, involving the packaging and “securitization” of mortgages known to be “liars’ loans”, which were then sold to unsuspecting investors by the creators of those products — who happened to be betting against the value of those items. In consideration of the fact that the credit crisis resulting from this scam caused fifteen million people to lose their jobs as well as an expected 8 – 12 million foreclosures by 2012, one may easily conclude that this fraud scheme should be considered the crime of both the last century as well as the current century.

While many people have been getting excited about the “insider trading” investigation currently underway, I have been sitting here, wearing my tinfoil hat, viewing the entire episode as a diversionary tactic to direct public attention away from the crimes that caused the financial crisis. Fortunately, I am not the only cynic with such an outlook. Jesse Eisenger recently wrote a piece for the DealBook blog at The New York Times entitled, “The Feds Stage a Sideshow While the Big Tent Sits Empty”. Here is some of what Eisenger had to say about the “insider trading” investigation:

In fact, plenty of people on Wall Street are happy about the investigation. The ones with clean consciences like the idea that the world of special access to favorable tips is being cleaned up.

But others are pleased for a different reason: They realize the investigation is a sideshow.

All the hype carries an air of defensiveness. Everyone is wondering: Where are the investigations related to the financial crisis?

John Hueston, a former lead Enron prosecutor, wonders, “Have they committed the resources in the right place? Do these scandals warrant apparent national priority status?”

Nobody from Lehman, Merrill Lynch or Citigroup has been charged criminally with anything. No top executives at Bear Stearns have been indicted. All former American International Group executives are running free. No big mortgage company executive has had to face the law.

There’s an old saying: “Justice delayed is justice denied.” The government has demonstrated that it is in no hurry to bring any significant criminal charges against the perpetrators of the crimes that caused the financial crisis. With the passing of time, it becomes increasingly obvious that those crimes will go unpunished. The cause of justice is simply no match for the ability of certain individuals to operate “above the law”. In fact, it never has been.

The human race insists on being naïve. The need to believe in some form of Santa Claus continues long after the age of 6. Is it just plain-old stupidity – or is it simply the uncritical acceptance of bogus narratives and public relations spin that keeps modern society’s consensual head buried in the sand?

Things haven’t changed that much since 1959. In that year, the highly-flamboyant, obviously gay pianist known as Liberace, filed a libel suit against the London-based Daily Mirror newspaper and its columnist, William Connor (who used the pseudonym, Cassandra) for implying that Liberace was a homosexual. Because the truth of the contested assertion is a legal defense, Liberace’s case would appear to be a classic example of what is often referred to as a “frivolous lawsuit”. Roy Greenslade of the Guardianprovided this account of the trial:

Connor wrote that Liberace was “… the summit of sex – the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want … a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love.”

* * *

After a six-day hearing, during which Liberace denied being homosexual or ever having taken part in homosexual acts, the jury found for him. He was awarded a then-record £8,000 in damages (about £500,000 in today’s money).

Just as an American jury was similarly inclined to ignore the evidence and acquit O. J. Simpson of murder charges three and one-half decades later, Liberace’s lawsuit demonstrated how the bright light of celebrity could out-shine the truth. From the Liberace trial to the O.J. trial — to the present day — it is almost impossible to “de-program” people who have been brainwashed by effective public relations and other forms of propaganda.

More recently, this past weekend brought us some examples of how painful it is for the public to accept the fact that our government is run by a bunch of hustlers. The simple truth is that our nation’s Capitol Building is the world’s largest whorehouse – inhabited by a vast number of people who will do anything for money. If those grafters can’t be prosecuted, the American taxpayers must insist that red lights and pink velvet curtains should be placed in all of the windows of the Capitol Building.

Numerous times this year, members of Congress have held fundraisers and collected big checks while they are taking critical steps to write new laws, despite warnings that such actions could create ethics problems. The campaign donations often came from contributors with major stakes riding on the lawmakers’ actions.

Leonnig and Farnam provided us with this fine example:

Earlier this month, the chairman of the Senate committee overseeing tax policy, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), gave himself a birthday-party fundraiser – on the same day that the chamber took its first vote on an $858 billion tax package that would provide breaks to wealthy citizens and business interests.

When the office of Senator Baucus was contacted by the Post reporters for comment, the response seemed tailor-made for a credulous public, comprised entirely of jurors from the Liberace and O. J. Simpson trials:

“Money has no influence on how Senator Baucus makes his decisions,” Baucus spokeswoman Kate Downen said. “The only factor that determines Senator Baucus’s votes is whether a policy is right for Montana and right for our country.”

. . . and Santa’s sleigh returned safely to the North Pole without interference from terrorists.

At the Decline of the Empire blog, Dave Cohen had some fun discussing the reactions of a few commentators who expressed shock and disappointment upon hearing that President Obama’s budget director, Peter Orszag, left that position to take a job with Citigroup:

Orszag’s move poses an existential crisis for these people. They want to believe in the political system, and they take it very seriously indeed. They spend a substantial part of their lives commenting on America’s political life. They make their living doing so. They are heavily vested in the primacy and righteousness of American politics. But then this Orszag guy turns around and joins Citigroup, making a mockery of everything they want to believe. Ultimately, Orszag mocked the very way they define themselves in the world. No wonder they are upset.

An “existential crisis” en masse could become the catalyst for awakening people to the realization that our political leaders and their bureaucratic minions are not as scrupulous as one might prefer to believe. The next financial crisis could provoke the requisite existential crisis which would motivate taxpayers to take action toward changing Washington’s culture of corruption. Such an event could result in the creation of an offshore tax escrow account where taxpayers would pay their taxes, to be withheld from the Internal Revenue Service (outside the jurisdiction of American courts) until our current officials simply pack up and leave. Since those politicians don’t do anything anyway, their absence won’t be noticed. Emergency elections could then be held to replace those vacancies. Perhaps you might have a better solution . . .

The problem became obvious at the onset of the financial crisis. All of the huffing and puffing about our glorious Free Market system was a big lie. Once the credit bubble had burst, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson went into panic mode – his eyes bulging outward even more than normal. During that fateful week of September 15 2008, Paulson had 24 telephone conversations with Lloyd Blankfein, his successor CEO at Goldman Sachs. AIG had to get bailed out at taxpayer expense. From across the pond, the reaction was immediate. On September 18 2008, Philip Broughton wrote an article for the Daily Mail entitled, “Free-market capitalism lies shredded … while America’s confidence is badly shaken”. Near the outset of the piece, Broughton chronicled the ugly truth:

For years now, we have had to listen to bankers attacking Washington for imposing regulations that inhibit the free markets from making even more money.

And all the while, they took exorbitant salaries, justifying them on the grounds of their huge contribution to capitalism.

How bitterly ironic it is, then, to see these one-time freemarketeers becoming socialists overnight.

The schoolyard bullies of Wall Street have gone running to the state for help, pleading to be saved from destruction.

They deserve neither our sympathy nor the billions in taxpayer support they are now receiving.

That theme has been reverberating through commentaries ever since.

A year later, Paul Farrell of MarketWatch provided an overview of writings by Jack Bogle, Marc Faber and Thomas Moore to support his contention that “America’s Soul of Capitalism” has been lost:

You know something’s very wrong: A year ago, too-greedy-to-fail banks were insolvent, in a near-death experience. Now, magically, they’re back to business as usual, arrogant, pocketing outrageous bonuses while Main Street sacrifices, and unemployment and foreclosures continue rising as tight credit, inflation and skyrocketing federal debt are killing taxpayers.

Down in Australia, The Propitious Managerwrote an essay on April 4 2010, expressing his amazement that America was having so much trouble trying to stomach the idea of government-backed healthcare:

When you read President O’bama’s healthcare plan the most striking message is the failure of a free market to provide for the community. The healthcare market in the US, left unfettered to run free, just crashes into a heap of mismanagement, inefficiency and opportunism (hold on – isn’t this a familiar story). I’ll leave you to read the script – but it isn’t a pretty picture.

* * *

What I like to call post free market economies, are about identifying the markets which are essential to maintaining thriving people and communities and develop the frameworks which optimize their performance. Some require complete freedom while others require varying degrees of framework from elected governments. Developing an increasingly sophisticated community and social framework is really the challenge of the century. One where it doesn’t matter whether your a rubbish collector or a billionaire – if you get sick, someone will care for you and if you invest your money it will be there when you wake up in the morning.

The idea that we are now living in a post-free-market economy presents itself in a recent commentary by Veronique de Rugy for Bloomberg News, entitled “Why Businesses Can’t Stand Free Markets”. Ms. De Rugy discussed how businesses exploit regulatory capture and use lobbyists to obtain favorable laws and regulations in order to stifle competition at the expense of consumers. She concluded with this thought:

Let’s hope that any court ruling deals a blow to the practice of entrenched businesses using government to impose higher costs on consumers while also thwarting upstart entrepreneurs. No one said loving free markets was easy.

On the other hand, there are many “upstart entrepreneurs” seeking government assistance to circumvent obstacles existing in the free-market system. This has become especially apparent in the burgeoning solar power industry, where American upstarts are attempting to compete with entities which obtain government financing – not only in China but in the eurozone as well. Martin LaMonica recently discussed this problem in an article for CNET:

Before the financial crisis, solar challengers were able to build manufacturing facilities using private money–venture capital, private equity, and hedge funds. These sources still exist, but private investors are being pickier about how they place their bets, said Ted Sullivan, solar analyst at Lux Research.

Raising money on the public markets with an initial public offering was possible a few years ago, too, but is very difficult now, said Ethan Zindler, head of policy analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Banks, meanwhile, are unlikely to finance the first factory for a solar company if the technology is relatively new and untested.

That leaves government programs, such as low-cost loans, and state incentives for economic development to help fill the financing gap in many cases.

* * *

In an effort to stimulate exports, the China Development Bank has made $40 billion in credit available to six solar companies in the past six months, said Zindler from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The U.S. stimulus program made billions of dollars available to stimulate clean-energy technologies, but the U.S. can’t match the amount of money China has made available through these low-cost loans, he said.

“Chinese solar companies are grinding down the cost by building plants the size the world has never seen before and deploying unbelievable amounts of capital to do it,” Zindler said.

In the U.S., the solar industry scored a victory with the passage of the tax bill last week because it included a one-year extension to a grant that replaces a tax credit subsidy. But it’s unclear what the long-term direction on renewable energy policy is in the U.S., which creates questions over how strong demand will be for solar, Zindler said.

In our post-free-market milieu, there are many exceptions to the general rule that government assistance to business is a bad thing. Now that people are finally facing up to the reality that many companies (some of which are Cayman Islands-based corporations) have been receiving U.S. government subsidies (of some sort) for decades, difficult decisions must be made to determine when this is appropriate and when it’s not. American voters need to face up to the fact that many of those poseurs claiming to be champions of “American free enterprise” are nothing more than hypocritical tools for whoever is lining their pockets. “American free enterprise” died at Maiden Lane. Deal with it.

No Labels is a 501(c)(4) social welfare advocacy organization created to provide a voice for America’s vital center, where ideas are judged on their merits, a position which is underrepresented in our current politics. No Labels provides a forum and community for Americans of all political backgrounds interested in seeing the nation move not left, not right, but forward. No Labels encourages all public officials to prioritize the national interest over party interest, and to cease acting on behalf of narrow, if vocal, special interests on the far right or left.

As a political centrist, I found most of what I read at the No Labels website appealing enough, although I disagreed with a bit of it. First of all, the group would have been more aptly-named, “No Polarization” since they aren’t really opposed to labels, as they explained:

We are never asking people to give up their labels, only put them aside to do what’s best for America.

Besides – I enjoy using labels to describe people. Some of my favorite labels include: corporatist, plutocrat, oligarch and tool. Another statement on the No Labels website with which I disagreed was the following remark, from their Statement of Purpose:

We can’t seem to break our addiction to foreign oil.

I would suggest: “We can’t seem to break our addiction to carbon-based energy sources.” There is no such thing as “foreign oil”. The so-called, “American” oil companies are all incorporated in the Cayman Islands and none of them pay income taxes to our government. All of our oil comes from multinational corporations and it is commingled with “Muslim oil” and “Venezuelan Communist oil” at storage depots. If the people from No Labels insist on treating us as idiots in the same manner as the two major political parties, they will deservedly fail in their mission.

I was particularly amused by the fact that so many people expressed outrage about the founding of No Labels. The new organization managed to draw plenty of ire from an assortment of commentators during the past week and it made for some fun reading. One of the “Founding Leaders” of No Labels is John Avlon of the Huffington Post. He recently wrote this essay in response to spleen-venting by Rush Limbaugh on the right and Keith Olbermann on the left – both of whom expressed displeasure with the inception of the new association:

“If we do this right, we can discredit this whole mind-set of the ‘moderate center’ being the defining group in American politics,” said Rush. “Because this No Labels group is going to end up illustrating what a fraudulent idea that whole concept of, ‘There are people who decide issue by issue. On the left they like certain things, on the right they like certain things.’ ”

So Rush believes that there are no principled Americans who decide what they believe on different policies issue-by-issue. For someone who talks about freedom a lot, he doesn’t have much faith in free will or free-thinking. He doesn’t believe that Americans — especially independent voters — can consider themselves fiscally conservative but socially liberal. You either walk in lockstep as a social conservative and fiscal conservative or you are a ‘hard-core liberal’ — libertarians, apparently, need not apply.

* * *

Keith Olbermann named No Labels one of the “worst persons in the world” last night (a badge of honor he gave to me earlier this year). He called us “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” and “a bunch of fraudulent conservative Democrats pretending to be moderates and a bunch of fraudulent Republicans pretending to be independents.” Again, there’s the impulse to divide and deny the legitimacy of anyone who doesn’t conform to a hyper-partisan view of politics.

Conservative columnist George Will provided this amusing bit of speculation that the entire effort might simply be a pretext for Michael Bloomberg’s Presidential ambitions:

Often in the year before the year before the year divisible by four, a few political people theatrically recoil from partisanship. Recently, this ritual has involved speculation about whether New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg might squander a few of his billions to improve America by failing to be elected president.

Oh, snap! Good one, George!

The strangest reaction to the kick-off of No Labels came from Frank Rich of The New York Times. The relevant portions of Mr. Rich’s rant seemed to be based on the theme that the Republican-dominated 112th Congress will be intransigent and therefore, President Obama along with his fellow Democrats, must fight intransigence with intransigence. This formula for gridlock would ultimately prove more harmful to Democrats than Republicans.

The Frank Rich diatribe was particularly bizarre because it rambled all over the place, with rants about people and subjects having nothing to do with No Labels. Peter Orszag has no connection to No Labels. So, why did Frank Rich go off on the wild tangent about Orszag, Citigroup and Scott Brown’s contributions from the financial sector as though any of them might have had something to do with No Labels? Forget about what John Avlon told you concerning Keith Olberman’s putting No Labels on his “worst persons in the world” list. According to Frank Rich, the entire No Labels effort is actually a “a promotional hobby horse for MSNBC”. It gets weirder: Rich believes that because a political consultant (Mark McKinnon) and a fund-raiser (Nancy Jacobson) are “prime movers” for No Labels . . . therefore “No Labels itself is another manifestation” of the syndrome wherein “both parties are bought off by special interests who game the system and stack it against the rest of us.” At this point, the only factoid I can find to support that allegation is the inclusion of the term “foreign oil” in the group’s Statement of Purpose. So, I’ll keep an open mind. Besides, I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as well as Jesse Ventura’s television program with the same name. Nevertheless, it becomes difficult to stick with Frank Rich’s theory that by failing to seek re-election as Senator of Indiana, Evan Bayh deliberately “facilitated the election of a high-powered corporate lobbyist, Dan Coats, as his Republican successor”. The fact that Bayh’s father, former Senator Birch Bayh, is a lobbyist is interposed to emphasize the likelihood that Evan will also become a lobbyist. Is this discussion being offered to explain that Evan Bayh “stepped aside” to allow Dan Coats to become Senator because Bayh has a genetic pre-disposition to the “Lobbyist Code of Dishonor”? If so, in what manner does this impact No Labels? Guilt by association?

The animosity generated by this group’s stand against what it calls “hyper-partisanship” demonstrates that the opponents of No Labels are advocates of hyper-partisanship. In the days ahead, it will be interesting to see who else speaks out to “give acrimony a chance”.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) was created by section 5 of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act (or FERA) which was signed into law on May 20, 2009. The ten-member Commission has been modeled after the Pecora Commission of the early 1930s, which investigated the causes of the Great Depression, and ultimately provided a basis for reforms of Wall Street and the banking industry. As I pointed out on April 15, more than a few commentators had been expressing their disappointment with the FCIC. Section (5)(h)(1) of the FERA established a deadline for the FCIC to submit its report:

On December 15, 2010, the Commission shall submit to the President and to the Congress a report containing the findings and conclusions of the Commission on the causes of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States.

In light of the fact that it took the FCIC eight months to conduct its first hearing, one shouldn’t be too surprised to learn that their report had not been completed by December 15. The FCIC expects to have the report finalized in approximately one month. This article by Phil Mattingly and Robert Schmidt of Bloomberg News provides a good history of the partisan struggle within the FCIC. On December 14, Sewell Chan of The New York Times disclosed that the four Republican members of the FCIC would issue their own report on December 15:

The Republican members of the panel were angered last week when the commission voted 6 to 4, along partisan lines, to limit individual comments by the commissioners to 9 pages each in a 500-page report that the commission plans to publish next month with Public Affairs, an imprint of the Perseus Books Group, one Republican commissioner said.

During a private commission meeting last week, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases “Wall Street” and “shadow banking” and the words “interconnection” and “deregulation” from the panel’s final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by Brooksley E. Born, one of the six commissioners who voted against the proposal.

I gave those four Republican members more credit than that. I was wrong. Commission Vice-Chairman Bill Thomas, along with Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Peter Wallison, and Keith Hennessey issued their own propaganda piece as a preemptive strike against whatever less-than-complimentary things the FCIC might ultimately say about the Wall Street Plutocrats. The spin strategy employed by these men in explaining the cause of the financial crisis is to blame Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the entire episode. (That specious claim has been debunked by Mark Thoma and others many times.) This remark from the “Introduction” section of the Republicans’ piece set the tone:

While the housing bubble, the financial crisis, and the recession are surely interrelated events, we do not believe that the housing bubble was a sufficient condition for the financial crisis. The unprecedented number of subprime and other weak mortgages in this bubble set it and its effect apart from others in the past.

Many economists and other commentators will have plenty of fun ripping this thing to shreds. One of the biggest lies that jumped right out at me was this statement from page 5 of the so-called Financial Crisis Primer:

Put simply, the risk of a housing collapse was simply not appreciated. Not by homeowners, not by investors, not by banks, not by rating agencies, and not by regulators.

That lie can and will be easily refuted — many times over — by the simple fact that a large number of essays had been published by economists, commentators and even dilettantes who predicted the housing collapse.

Yves Smith provided a refreshing retort to the Plutocracy’s Primer at her Naked Capitalism website:

This whole line of thinking is garbage, the financial policy equivalent of arguing that the sun revolves around the earth. Yes, the US and other countries provide overly generous subsidies to housing, and curtailing them over time would not be a bad idea. But that’s been our policy for decades. Calling that a major, let alone primary, cause of the crisis, is simply a highly coded “blame the poor” strategy. In reality, both the run-up to the crisis and its aftermath were one of the greatest wealth transfers from the citizenry at large to a comparatively small group of rentiers in the history of man.

* * *

This pathetic development shows how deeply this country is in thrall to lobbyists. But these so-called commissioners, who are really no more than financial services minions out to misbrand themselves as independent, look to have overplayed their hand. This stunt shows more than a tad of desperation on the part of banks and their operatives in their excessive efforts block any remotely accurate, and therefore critical, report on the industry.

Perversely, this development may be a positive indicator on several fronts. First, the FCIC report may be tougher and more probing than I dared hope.

The fact that a pre-emptive strike by the Plutocratic “Gang of Four” has been initiated with the release of their Primer could indeed suggest that that their patrons are worried about the ultimate conclusions to be published by the FCIC next month. The release of this Primer will surely draw plenty of criticism and attract more attention to the FCIC’s final report. Nevertheless, will the resulting firestorm motivate the public to finally demand some serious action beyond the lame “financial reform” fiasco? Adam Garfinkle’s recent essay in The American Interest suggests that such hope could be misplaced:

Obsessed with vacuous celebrity, Americans make it easier than ever for plutocrats to sail under the radar. Corporate heavyweights and bankers may be suborning Congress and ripping off “we the people” left and right, but we’re too busy dancing with the stars to notice.

My vintage iPhone sputtered, stammered and finally stalled out as I tried to access an article about derivatives trading after clicking on the link. The process got as far as the appearance of the URL, which indicated that the source was The New York Times. I assumed that the piece had been written by Gretchen Morgenson and that I could read it once I sat down at my regular computer. Within moments, I was at The Big Picture website, where I found another link to the same article. This time it worked and I found that the piece had been written by Louise Story. “Wrong blonde”, I thought to myself. It was at that point when I realized how much the world had changed from the days when “dumb blonde” jokes had been so popular. In fact, a vast amount of the skullduggery that caused and resulted from the financial crisis has been exposed and explained by women with blonde hair. After a handful of unscrupulous Wall Street bankers brought the world’s financial system to the brink of collapse, an even smaller number of blonde, female sleuths set about unwinding this complex web of deceit for “the Average Joe” to understand. Here are a few of them:

ECONNED is the most deeply researched and empirically validated account of the financial meltdown of 2008-2009 and how its unaddressed causes predict similar crises to come. As a long-time Wall Street veteran, Yves Smith, through her influential blog “Naked Capitalism” lucidly explains to her over 2500,000 unique visitors each month exactly what games market players use and how their “innovations” evolved over the years to take the rest of us to the cleaners. Smith is that unusual combination of scholar, expert, participant and teacher, who writes with a clarifying sense of moral outrage and disgust at the decline of ethics on Wall Street and financial markets.

Smith’s daily list of Links at Naked Capitalism, covers a broad range of newsworthy subjects both within and beyond the financial realm. I usually find myself reading all of the articles linked on that page.

Gretchen Morgenson is my favorite reporter for The New York Times. She has proven herself to be Treasury Secretary Turbo Tim Geithner’s worst nightmare. Ms. Morgenson has caused Geithner so much agony, I would not be surprised to hear that he named his recent kidney stone after her. With Jo Becker, Ms. Morgenson wrote the most revealing essay on Geithner back in April of 2009. Once you’ve read it, you will have a better understanding of why Geithner gave away so many billions to the banksters as president of the New York Fed by way of Maiden Lane III. Morgenson subsequently wrote her own article on Maiden Lane III here.

Gretchen Morgenson is often a target of heated criticism on the blogosphere, which I have argued more than once is overdone. While her articles on executive compensation and securities litigation are consistently well reported, she has an appetite for the wilder side of finance, and often looks a bit out of her depth. Typically, she simply runs afoul of finance pedants, who jump on misapplication of industry jargon or minor errors when those (admittedly disconcerting) errors fail to derail the thrust of the argument.

A noted example of this was Morgenson’s article of March 6 2010, in which she explained that Greece was hiding its financial obligations with “credit default swaps” rather than currency swaps. The bloggers who vigilantly watch for her to make such a mistake wouldn’t let go of that one for quite a while. Nevertheless, I like her work. Nobody is perfect.

As I mentioned at the outset of this piece, Louise Story wrote the recent article for The New York Times, concerning anticompetitive practices in the credit derivatives clearing, trading and information services industries. Discussing that subject in a manner that can make it understandable to the “average reader” (someone with a high school education) is no easy task. Beyond that, Ms. Story was able to explain the frustrations of regulators, who had hoped that some degree of transparency could be introduced to the derivatives market as a result of the recently enacted, “Dodd-Frank” financial reform bill. It’s an important article, which has drawn a good deal of well-deserved attention.

Last year, Ms. Story co-authored a New York Times article with Gretchen Morgenson, concerning collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) entitled, “Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won”. As I pointed out at the time: Pay close attention to the explanation of how Tim Geithner retained a “special counselor” whose previous responsibilities included oversight of the parent company of an investment firm named Tricadia, Inc. Tricadia has the dubious honor of having helped cause the financial crisis by creating CDOs and then betting against them.

These three women, as well as a number of their non-blonde counterparts (including: Nomi Prins, Janet Tavakoli and Naomi Klein) have exposed a vast amount of the odious activities that caused the financial crisis. They have helped inform and educate the public on what the “good old boys” network of bankers, regulators and lobbyists have been doing to this country. The paradigm shift that took us beyond the sexist stereotype of the “dumb blonde” has brought our society to the point where women – often blonde ones – have intervened to alert the rest of us to the hazards caused by what Paul Farrell of MarketWatch described as “Wall Street’s macho ego trip”.

If you should come across someone who still tells “dumb blonde” jokes – ask that person if he (or she) has read ECONned.

The never-ending catastrophe caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blowout receives minimal coverage by the mainstream media. An onslaught of awful news continues to flow out from the Gulf of Corexit, although interested citizens seeking to access that information need to do a little “drilling” of their own find it. As I noted just before November’s mid-term elections, the BP-sponsored, lamestream media seem more than happy with the claim of “mission accomplished” voiced by Coast Guard Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft (the man in charge of the federal response to the disaster) and his top science adviser, Steve Lehmann. Last July, I discussed the rather peculiar and questionable response to the crisis provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). I focused on NOAA’s bizarre program of using “human canaries” to perform smell and taste tests on Gulf fish to ascertain the presence of contaminants. No kidding.

Since last summer, I have been keeping up with the Gulf of Corexit tragedy by checking in on Washington’s Blog, which has done a diligent job of keeping the spotlight on everything that has been going on with the cover-up investigation of the events that have transpired both before and after the blowout event. This posting from October 23 provided some links to a number of genuinely scary stories concerning some awful physiological consequences experienced by those who have been immersed in that toxic environment. More recently, Washington’s Blog discussed a proposal by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to “force the good men and women in our armed services” to eat Gulf coast seafood.

While our government persists in contriving grizzly science fair projects involving human consumption of seafood from the Gulf of Corexit, the concerned people at the Florida Oil Spill Law website continue to provide a number of important revelations that will come as quite a surprise to those who have been preoccupied with Christina Aguilera’s divorce. A visit to that site provides links to stories such as this report by Randy Kistner of the Natural Resources Defense Council:

It all started on a warm spring night last May in the fertile fishing grounds near Barataria Bay. BP’s busted undersea well was in its early days of eruption, spewing more than two million gallons of Louisiana crude into the sea each day. Todd and Darla were trawling at night near the Gulf in Four Bayou Pass, trying to capture as many shrimp as they could before the offshore oil finally made its way to the coast. Unknown to Todd and Darla, that night would be the first time the massive oil and chemical dispersant mix began pouring into the Barataria Bay.

Darla remembers what it felt that night after she was doused with water that she believes was full of oil and dispersants. It was like being covered in stinging jellyfish, she says, except there were no jellyfish to be found.

“My husband shook the nets and water went on me. I didn’t have a menstrual period for four months. I had rash, itching irritated skin, something similar to bronchitis which I’ve never had. It lasted for three or four months. Eye irritations, heart pains, heart palpitations, involuntary muscles jumping all over my body, and continuous headaches day and night … all I would get is a about a 15 minute to a 20 minute break from pain relievers that are specifically designed to get rid of headaches, that’s the only break I would get. And I had to eat those 24 hours a day, seven days a week for three to four months … And they want to tell me to eat the seafood? Why don’t they eat the seafood. I’ll go catch them and I’ll throw BP a big old boil … I’m not eating it.”

“Still in shock”: Alabama shrimpers find catch “coated in oil” at area open for fishing — Boat to be decontaminated

Meanwhile, those who rely on the mainstream media for information about the current situation in the Gulf can expect to find reports such as this passage from a December 9 piece appearing in The Miami Herald:

Claims have come from all types of South Florida businesses and residents. They include commercial fishermen, marinas, restaurants, hotels, dive watering holes, real estate agents, waterfront property owners, lobster trap makers, municipalities and even Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum in Key West.

Some find it hard to believe these claims. After all, the spill occurred hundreds of miles away and not one drop of oil has reached South Florida’s waters, shorelines or beaches.

“It wasn’t the reality. It was the perception that hurt us, and is still affecting us,” said Harold Wheeler, executive director of the Monroe County Tourist Development Council. “Many people think we got the oil — and still have it.”

On the other hand, some find it hard to believe the information they are being fed by the mainstream media, NOAA and other government agencies. Of course, there is never a shortage of people anxious to jump on the bandwagon to file bogus claims in the wake of a disaster. Nevertheless, the concern held by many of us in South Florida is that if there are potentially harmful levels of contaminants presently in the waters off the Florida Keys – it could be a long time before we find out about them.

Quite a bit has been written about the Federal Reserve’s December 1 release of documents revealing the details of its bailouts to those business entities benefiting from the Fed’s eleven emergency lending programs initiated as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. When you consider the fact that those documents concern over 21,000 transactions, all the attention should come as no surprise.

The two individuals who seem to have benefited the most from this event are Congressman Ron Paul and Senator Bernie Sanders. The two became unlikely allies in their battle to include an “Audit the Fed” provision in the financial reform bill. Ron Paul, the Libertarian Republican from Texas (considered the “Godfather of the Tea Party movement”) authored the book, End The Fed. Congressman Paul sponsored the original “Audit the Fed” proposal in the House of Representatives – H.R. 1207. Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, sponsored the watered-down “Audit the Fed” bill — S. 3217 — which replaced Congressman Paul’s version in what finally became known as the Restoring Financial Stability Act of 2010.

Under pressure from the Obama administration, Mr. Sanders, who has described himself as a democratic socialist, made last-minute changes to his proposal; it doesn’t require audits of monetary policy, and it doesn’t require disclosure of the names of banks that use the discount window.

An unhappy Paul, a long-time Fed critic, said Mr. Sanders had “sold out.”

Who would have ever thought that a Libertarian Republican would, one day, accuse a democratic socialist of “selling out” on a bill to regulate the financial industry?

With the Republicans’ becoming the majority party in the House, the numerous committee chairmanships will now pass from the Democrats to the GOP for the 112th Congress. Although quite a bit of concern has been expressed by liberal pundits that the banking lobby will now have unfettered control over Congress, many banking industry lobbyists are sweating over the fact that Ron Paul will be the likely Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. That fear and the efforts by ranking Republicans to assuage that dread were discussed in a recent article by Phil Mattingly and Robert Schmidt for Bloomberg BusinessWeek:

Five GOP leadership aides, speaking anonymously because a decision isn’t final, say incoming House Speaker John Boehner has discussed ways to prevent Paul from becoming chairman or to keep him on a tight leash if he does. If Boehner, who will help determine who gets to chair subcommittees as early as Dec. 8, rejects Paul, he may have to contend with thousands of grassroots supporters and dozens of younger lawmakers who see Paul as a hero. Boehner, through a spokesman, declined to comment. “A lot of the older members probably think Ron is a little bit out of step,” says Representative Bill Posey, a Florida Republican and unabashed Paul fan. “The depth of his knowledge on monetary policy, his understanding of it all, is second to none.”

Nevertheless, Ron Paul accused a socialist of “selling out” by capitulating to the pressure exerted by the banking lobby through its puppet – the Obama administration. His use of such a reproach demonstrates that Congressman Paul cannot be trusted to make certain that the House Financial Services Committee serves as a tool of the banking lobby. Beyond that, the extreme, partisan elements of the Republican Party cannot depend on Congressman Paul to “follow the script” written to portray Obama as the socialist.

As the Bloomberg BusinessWeekarticle pointed out, any efforts to deprive Congressman Paul of this chairmanship will guarantee some serious blowback from the Tea Party ranks as well as the other supporters of Ron Paul. John Boehner is in a serious double-bind here. If he allows Paul to assume the chairmanship, Boehner’s anticipated efforts to keep Paul “on a tight leash” should provide some good entertainment.

The Democratic Party is suffering from a case of terminal smugness. Democrats ignored the warning back in 2006, when the South Park television series ran the episode, “Smug Alert”.

I recently came across a dangerous manifestation of “The Smug” in a recent article written by Ed Kilgore for The New Republic, in which Mr. Kilgore complacently explained “why Obama won’t face a primary challenge”. We are supposed to forget about the “shellacking” taken by Democrats in the mid-term elections. We are to ignore the fact that “mischief-making pundits have seized on a couple of polls to burnish their narrative”. In an act exemplifying what my late father described as “tempting fate”, Mr. Kilgore proceeded to belittle the most serious criticisms of the President, while daring lightening to strike:

Above all, primary challenges to incumbent presidents require a galvanizing issue. It’s very doubtful that the grab-bag of complaints floated by the Democratic electorate — Obama’s legislative strategy during the health care fight; his relative friendliness to Wall Street; gay rights; human rights; his refusal to prosecute Bush administration figures for war crimes or privacy violations — would be enough to spur a serious challenge. And while Afghanistan is an increasing source of Democratic discontent, it’s hardly Vietnam, and Obama has promised to reduce troop levels sharply by 2012.

The timing of Kilgore’s supercilious disregard of a challenge to Obama’s presence atop the 2012 ticket could not have been worse. Thanks to the efforts of the late Mark Pittman, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Bloomberg Newshas forced the Federal Reserve to disclose the details of its bailouts to those business entities benefiting from the Fed’s eleven emergency lending programs initiated as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. The Fed’s massive document dump on December 1 (occurring right on the heels of the WikiLeaks publication of indiscretions by Obama’s Secretary of State — Hillary Clinton) has refocused criticism of what Kilgore described as the President’s “relative friendliness to Wall Street”. Although Mr. Obama had not yet assumed office in the fall of 2008, after moving into the White House, the new President re-empowered the same cast of characters responsible for the financial crisis and the worst of the bailouts. The architect of Maiden Lane III (which included a $13 billion gift to Goldman Sachs) “Turbo” Tim Geithner, was elevated from president of the New York Fed to Treasury Secretary. Ben Bernanke was re-nominated by Obama (over strenuous bipartisan objection) to serve another term as Federal Reserve Chairman.

In the 2008 Democratic Primary elections, voters chose “change” rather than another Clinton administration. Nevertheless, what the voters got was another Clinton administration. After establishing an economic advisory team consisting of retreads from the Clinton White House, President Obama has persisted in approaching the 2010 economy as though it were the 1996 economy. Obama’s creation of a bipartisan deficit commission has been widely criticized as an inept fallback to the obsolete Bill Clinton playbook. Robert Reich, Labor Secretary for the original Clinton administration recently upbraided President Obama for this wrongheaded approach:

Bill Clinton had a rapidly expanding economy to fall back on, so his appeasement of Republicans didn’t legitimize the Republican world view. Obama doesn’t have that luxury. The American public is still hurting and they want to know why.

The Pragmatic Capitalist criticized President Obama’s habitual reliance on members of the Clinton administration as futile attempts to bring about the same results obtained fifteen years ago. Obama’s appointment of Erskine Bowles (Clinton’s former Chief of Staff) as co-chair of the deficit commission was denounced as a recent example. Bowles’ platitudinous insistence that it’s time for an “adult conversation about the dangers of this debt” drew this blistering retort:

“exact same conversation every family, every single business, every single state and every single municipality has been having these last few years.”

There is only one problem with this remark. The federal government is NOTHING like a household, state or municipality. These entities are all revenue constrained. The Federal government has no such constraint. We don’t need China to lend us money. We don’t need to raise taxes to spend money. When the US government wants to spend money it sends men and women into a room where they mark up accounts in a computer system. They don’t call China first or check their tax revenues. They just spend the money.

* * *
Mr. Bowles finished his press conference by saying that the American people get it:

“There is one thing I am absolutely sure of. If nothing else, I know deep down the American people get it. They know this is the moment of truth”

The American people most certainly don’t get it. And how can you blame them? When a supposed financial expert like Mr. Bowles can’t grasp these concepts how could we ever expect the average American to understand it? It’s time for an adult conversation to begin before this misguided conversation regarding the future bankruptcy of America sends us towards our own “moment of truth” – a 1937 moment.

I hope it doesn’t take “a 1937 moment” for the Democrats to appreciate the very serious risk that the Palin family could be living in the White House in 2013.

About TheCenterLane.com

TheCenterLane.com offers opinion, news and commentary on politics, the economy, finance and other random events that either find their way into the news or are ignored by the news reporting business. As the name suggests, our focus will be on what seems to be happening in The Center Lane of American politics and what the view from the Center reveals about the events in the left and right lanes. Your Host, John T. Burke, Jr., earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College with a double major in Speech Communications and Philosophy. He earned his law degree (Juris Doctor) from the Illinois Institute of Technology / Chicago-Kent College of Law.